Posted by: LH Justin
As you said up to date software virtually prevent this. Not to mention modern occurrences of this are extremely obscure. You are right, it is possible to send a virus via an image, but the chances of it occurring are incredibly small do to the impracticality of such a method. Image uploaders also typically have precautions that look through the files you are uploading and I assume that Bungie would use their own uploader rather than allowing people to use off-site avatars. I was quite careless with my words, but for all intents and purposes uploading a virus bearing image to Bungie.net would be impossible, as it would be on most online sites. The person I was responding to was acting as if it would be a major problem.Well, yes, it would be a major problem (and at the very least an extreme inconvenience to have a warning message cover the screen each time your browser loaded a certain image) considering what I described can be used to steal your details and perform actions on the site on behalf of your account. What I'm describing also isn't a virus.
Also, Photobucket is one example of an image hosting service which does not screen its images, since there are those I'm describing hosted there.
Posted by: LH Justin
And yeah, I would say it has to do with the internet considering an image would be uploaded to a server and then downloaded and cached by your browser, an application used to access the Internet.If I host an image and a HTML document on my private server within my LAN, that is not on the Internet. I could save the same files locally to my hard drive and still be vulnerable.
Further, the Internet is a globally connected network of network infrastructure - routers, switches, etc... You use other network infrastructure to access the Internet - modem, cable, etc... What you're describing is the Web. The Web is a service that runs atop the Internet at the application layer. Browsers, generally, access the Web by communicating with HTTP (Web) servers.
Posted by: LH Justin
Also, of course the images wouldn't prevent the rest of the page from loading. You would, however, see a bunch of blanks spaces where images should be. I myself consider a page incomplete when everything on the page isn't finished loading. My apologies again for the misunderstanding of words.Well, what do you think happens on this site when your browser has not cached an avatar of a user yet? Those "blank spaces" appear. So how is what already happens any different?
Posted by: relliK42
Well we don't want the mods to have to clean up after tons upon tons of inappropriate avatars. Plus, some people could go overboard with avatars/.gifs that, I believe, could use up a lot of memory or make some pages on where they appear slow down/laggy.I kind of disagree. With the right restrictions, it's not as easy to post something inappropriate. Case in point: I've only had to ban maybe 3 people ever from Coup d'Bungie since it's been up (over a year).